Terminator 3: Rise of the Machines
The machines should have stayed down.
Published: November 30, 2003
In my True Crime review, I mentioned a pair of different scenarios for a game that just couldn't meet its potential, thus effectively wasting the source material. Black Ops and Atari's latest Terminator 3 effort fits perfectly into the first definition of wasted potential; it's crude, rough, and while it certainly tries to replicate the universe the surprisingly good third Terminator movie presented, the talent and resources necessary at Black Ops to really make this a good licensed game just weren't there. Instead, Terminator 3 stands as a pretty perfect example of how licensed games can go horribly wrong.
The game starts out interestingly enough, as you're treated to a rather lengthy (and halfway decent) CG sequence that basically shows the process whereby the T-850 (that'd be Arnie himself) was reprogrammed and sent back our time. There's a healthy smattering of action, and the Terminator does a good job of showing off his ability to do what he was programmed to do best: bust stuff up. Unfortunately, the CG gives way to the actual game itself, and this is where things go horribly wrong.
First-person shooters aren't an exact science, and as any of the dozens upon dozens of different developers over the years have told you, it's perfectly possible to create an average FPS given that you stick to a couple basic principles, something that Black Ops seemingly ignored. For starters, the analog control is ridiculously oversensitive while manning things like turrets, meaning it'll take a good half-dozen retries of aiming with the right analog stick before you'll finally draw a bead on something - that's if it's not moving. This is probably the biggest problem with T3; the fact that it expects you to repel a small army of killer robots with controls that feel as though they're being relayed to a crackhead on a monster bender. There's an option to tweak the sensitivity for the main controls, but it doesn't affect things while manning a stationary gun, and must be applied at the start of the game or you'll quickly end up firing everywhere but where you want to shoot.
Things pull out of first-person perspective when it comes time to trade blows with other machines (read: the quite sexay Terminator T-X), and again, this is where things fall apart. Sure, the idea behind two machines kicking the crap out of each other and their environments in the process is a great one, but the execution can't quite deliver the visceral impact of kicking someone across the length of a truck bed (while it's screaming down the road, I might add). The motion-captured movements lack any real smoothness between movements (yes, machines are rather jerky, but this is ridiculous). Because of this, things feel more like a timed sequence of button mashing interludes.
Following in a close second is the game's decision to make ammo painfully scarce. Sure, you can move to fists as a last-ditch melee option, but that also means moving to arms' length, which in turn means taking quite a bit of damage. Things are smoothed out a bit by the fact that ammo and health are randomly scattered around the levels, but it doesn't hide the fact that you'll be shooting all around a target before you finally connect for the first couple hours of play. You'd think with things far enough into the post-apocalyptic future there'd be at least a simple weapon that had near-unlimited ammo. The future is dark indeed.
It's not hard to see where the developer was going with the general focus of the game. Levels regularly weave in and out of scenes from the movie, and in Enter The Matrix-style moments often shadow events from the movie in levels that take place just beyond the film camera's reach. Just as the aforementioned Shiny-developed game showed, it's often pretty cool to be able to explore an area you couldn't in the movie, but equally demonstrable was the effect of a team that just couldn't do the license justice. The effort was certainly there, especially in recreating key action moments from the movies (the shootout in the cemetery springs to mind), but the execution was irrevocably marred by the presentation.
If nothing else, the game does a very nice job of getting you interested in the T3 universe. Tons of extras from the movie, including behind-the-scenes footage, interviews and artwork from all phases of the design process were either integrated into the game or offered as extras. After poking around the extras menu and checking out the default unlocked goodies, my girlfriend exclaimed, "I don't know about the game, but I kinda want to see the movie now." As you move through each level, you'll unlock more stills, movies, and more that explain quite a bit about the Terminator mythology - things you probably think you wouldn't care about, like why the Arnold versions of the Terminator models look and sound like, well, Arnold. It's genuinely funny and it's easily the game's strongest selling point.
Parked a good couple hundred miles behind that selling point are the game's graphics and sound, both of which seemed to convey the bare minimum of effort to get the job done. While there is plenty of variety in the game levels, and the ones taken from the movie certainly hold up better than the ones created for the game, there's little here that will wow you - if anything at all.
Black Ops, presumably culling from their experience as a college hoops developer, chose to employ motion capture for the majority of animations, and it shows, though I doubt in the way they were shooting for. Rather than just licensing a decent physics middleware solution like Havoc's brilliant physics system, T3 instead relies on canned animations for the appropriate situation, meaning you'll see the same machines go down the same way (albeit sometimes at different angles) over and over again. Because no real physics are involved, the animation for an explosion hitting right next to an enemy terminator is the exact same as at the edge of the blast radius, and carries absolutely zero illusion of weight or inertia.
While I was plenty happy to hear that Atari was able to get the rights to Brad Fiedel's now-famous theme from T2, hearing the music repeated over and over again on the menus slowly began to kill the impact that the song had, which is unfortunate, because in all but the CG scenes, the music in the background has almost no impact, instead resorting to simple electronic loops and generic chords to create an aural backdrop.
The participation of some of the major effects and voice talent involved in the film does a fantastic job of making things sound authentic for the most point; that all too familiar thup-thup of laser fire, regular quips from Arnold and voice actors that do a good job of sounding like their movie star counterparts (Schwarzenegger and Nick Stahl, who played John Connor in the movie, were the only big actors willing to lend their voices). Explosions are heavy, and sound like ricocheting shots pop with nice intensity.
T3 just doesn't work as a game in the hands of developers that can't really pull off the vision of the filmmakers. From the extras it certainly appears some of the bigger names involved in the movie were willing to contribute info, but when it comes down to it the coding of the game, the task should probably have been handed off to someone with a little more experience. I suppose it's great that we're seeing this level of collaboration on projects like T3 and The Matrix series, but until Hollywood can hook up with a series of developers with some serious clout, we're going to keep perpetuating the myth that licensed games can't be good. There are a few exceptions, but by and large right now this T3 game is the rule.
It might be worth renting if you'd like to check out some of the extras on the DVD (there's actually a demo of the infinitely more enjoyable Paradigm T3 game on disc, as well as unlockable demos of Centipede and Missile Command for those looking for more game), but otherwise, there's no reason to even give this game more than a passing glance. Terminator fans deserved much better.
The game starts out interestingly enough, as you're treated to a rather lengthy (and halfway decent) CG sequence that basically shows the process whereby the T-850 (that'd be Arnie himself) was reprogrammed and sent back our time. There's a healthy smattering of action, and the Terminator does a good job of showing off his ability to do what he was programmed to do best: bust stuff up. Unfortunately, the CG gives way to the actual game itself, and this is where things go horribly wrong.
First-person shooters aren't an exact science, and as any of the dozens upon dozens of different developers over the years have told you, it's perfectly possible to create an average FPS given that you stick to a couple basic principles, something that Black Ops seemingly ignored. For starters, the analog control is ridiculously oversensitive while manning things like turrets, meaning it'll take a good half-dozen retries of aiming with the right analog stick before you'll finally draw a bead on something - that's if it's not moving. This is probably the biggest problem with T3; the fact that it expects you to repel a small army of killer robots with controls that feel as though they're being relayed to a crackhead on a monster bender. There's an option to tweak the sensitivity for the main controls, but it doesn't affect things while manning a stationary gun, and must be applied at the start of the game or you'll quickly end up firing everywhere but where you want to shoot.
Things pull out of first-person perspective when it comes time to trade blows with other machines (read: the quite sexay Terminator T-X), and again, this is where things fall apart. Sure, the idea behind two machines kicking the crap out of each other and their environments in the process is a great one, but the execution can't quite deliver the visceral impact of kicking someone across the length of a truck bed (while it's screaming down the road, I might add). The motion-captured movements lack any real smoothness between movements (yes, machines are rather jerky, but this is ridiculous). Because of this, things feel more like a timed sequence of button mashing interludes.
Following in a close second is the game's decision to make ammo painfully scarce. Sure, you can move to fists as a last-ditch melee option, but that also means moving to arms' length, which in turn means taking quite a bit of damage. Things are smoothed out a bit by the fact that ammo and health are randomly scattered around the levels, but it doesn't hide the fact that you'll be shooting all around a target before you finally connect for the first couple hours of play. You'd think with things far enough into the post-apocalyptic future there'd be at least a simple weapon that had near-unlimited ammo. The future is dark indeed.
It's not hard to see where the developer was going with the general focus of the game. Levels regularly weave in and out of scenes from the movie, and in Enter The Matrix-style moments often shadow events from the movie in levels that take place just beyond the film camera's reach. Just as the aforementioned Shiny-developed game showed, it's often pretty cool to be able to explore an area you couldn't in the movie, but equally demonstrable was the effect of a team that just couldn't do the license justice. The effort was certainly there, especially in recreating key action moments from the movies (the shootout in the cemetery springs to mind), but the execution was irrevocably marred by the presentation.
If nothing else, the game does a very nice job of getting you interested in the T3 universe. Tons of extras from the movie, including behind-the-scenes footage, interviews and artwork from all phases of the design process were either integrated into the game or offered as extras. After poking around the extras menu and checking out the default unlocked goodies, my girlfriend exclaimed, "I don't know about the game, but I kinda want to see the movie now." As you move through each level, you'll unlock more stills, movies, and more that explain quite a bit about the Terminator mythology - things you probably think you wouldn't care about, like why the Arnold versions of the Terminator models look and sound like, well, Arnold. It's genuinely funny and it's easily the game's strongest selling point.
Parked a good couple hundred miles behind that selling point are the game's graphics and sound, both of which seemed to convey the bare minimum of effort to get the job done. While there is plenty of variety in the game levels, and the ones taken from the movie certainly hold up better than the ones created for the game, there's little here that will wow you - if anything at all.
Black Ops, presumably culling from their experience as a college hoops developer, chose to employ motion capture for the majority of animations, and it shows, though I doubt in the way they were shooting for. Rather than just licensing a decent physics middleware solution like Havoc's brilliant physics system, T3 instead relies on canned animations for the appropriate situation, meaning you'll see the same machines go down the same way (albeit sometimes at different angles) over and over again. Because no real physics are involved, the animation for an explosion hitting right next to an enemy terminator is the exact same as at the edge of the blast radius, and carries absolutely zero illusion of weight or inertia.
While I was plenty happy to hear that Atari was able to get the rights to Brad Fiedel's now-famous theme from T2, hearing the music repeated over and over again on the menus slowly began to kill the impact that the song had, which is unfortunate, because in all but the CG scenes, the music in the background has almost no impact, instead resorting to simple electronic loops and generic chords to create an aural backdrop.
The participation of some of the major effects and voice talent involved in the film does a fantastic job of making things sound authentic for the most point; that all too familiar thup-thup of laser fire, regular quips from Arnold and voice actors that do a good job of sounding like their movie star counterparts (Schwarzenegger and Nick Stahl, who played John Connor in the movie, were the only big actors willing to lend their voices). Explosions are heavy, and sound like ricocheting shots pop with nice intensity.
T3 just doesn't work as a game in the hands of developers that can't really pull off the vision of the filmmakers. From the extras it certainly appears some of the bigger names involved in the movie were willing to contribute info, but when it comes down to it the coding of the game, the task should probably have been handed off to someone with a little more experience. I suppose it's great that we're seeing this level of collaboration on projects like T3 and The Matrix series, but until Hollywood can hook up with a series of developers with some serious clout, we're going to keep perpetuating the myth that licensed games can't be good. There are a few exceptions, but by and large right now this T3 game is the rule.
It might be worth renting if you'd like to check out some of the extras on the DVD (there's actually a demo of the infinitely more enjoyable Paradigm T3 game on disc, as well as unlockable demos of Centipede and Missile Command for those looking for more game), but otherwise, there's no reason to even give this game more than a passing glance. Terminator fans deserved much better.
